Well, this seems designed to give nVidia lower production costs, yes.
However, it seems to me that graphics cards are WAY more expensive than they used to be. Normally, when new technologies become mainstream, they are introduced at a similar price to the old tech. and competition's tech., in an effort to compete. This is by design in capitalism, of course -- companies are supposed to compete to bring technology to the people at an ever cheaper price.
nVidia seemed to sidestep all of that good social design, though. Instead of bringing their new tech out at the normal price, they brought it out -- perhaps a LITTLE before its time, but not much -- at a higher price. And people bought it anyway. So now, people pay hundreds for cards that are really useless outside of high-end 3D workstations, since the software doesn't catch up that quickly.
Translation: nVidia and ATI are getting close-to-mainstream levels of sales at above-mainstream prices. As a result, they have ever more money to put into their products, and stomping out competition.
Let's hope we see those Free/Open graphics cards soon, before it's too late and nVidia is the hardware equivalent of Microsoft.
Exactly. On the face of it, KDE and GNOME can appear to be similar to some people. You may even dislike KDE's Qt interface for a while until you get used to it. However, KDE has amazingly powerful technology underneath. Spend a few months doing all your work on KDE, giving yourself time to discover (discovery learning is good) its hidden strengths, and you'll never look back.
I don't often agree with Linus, but what he said about GNOME and KDE was spot-on: when you take the time to try them both, you'll surely see that GNOME is clearly inferior, and KDE clearly shines as a bright technology -- perhaps the best technology -- available in Free Software.
Well, PAL is a standard in some countries, whereas NTSC is a standard in others. They're competing standards, but not in the SAME place.
At BEST, allowing people to choose between ODF and MSXML will lead to division and confusion and incompatibility within Mass. ITD, which is exactly what Quinn wanted a standard to solve. So, it defeats the purpose in the best case scenario. In the worst case scenario, however, you have an inferior format and all the vendor-lockin that goes with it chosen over the CLEARLY superior ODF format.
Also, you have MS manipulating governments to make it happen, when the (original) powers that were clearly favored the superior format and understood WHY they favored it.
There is absolutely nothing good about this, except for Microsoft. I don't know if this is a final decision, but if it is, then corporations have won over the citizens they're supposed to exist for yet again.
Although it's fascinating that mice could be created with human brain cells, this is actually the second such experiment. Whatever the reason... something to do with DNA that I don't quite understand... it turned out to be easier to modify chimp genes than mice genes to this. The research team put up a site, here.
Well, except that the military is probably quite interested in IPv6, since it'll give them lots of shiny new IP addresses for their shiny new cyberwarfare robots and guided missiles and soldiers with HUDs, etc.
No, you don't need users to give up peripherals to lock down ports. All you need to do is provide the peripherals in a managed way, on YOUR terms. Put printers directly on the network, not at people's desks. Force people to stop using floppy disks and other removable storage, and to rely on the centrally managed and backed-up fileserver(s). Force people to synchronise their laptop/tablet/pocketpc/palmtop over the network with pre-approved scripts/software/settings, rather than linking to their PC and copying files. Have one non-desktop system that allows a camera to be plugged in, and will automatically extract the pictures from it, then place them on the fileserver, in a secure folder for that department/user's own stuff, if need be.
Products have kinks, sure. But releasing a games console that overheats is just negligence and disrespect for customers. They could easily have left one running a benchmark and figured out how hot it gets. In fact, I can't think of ANY way to believe they didn't know about this and the crashing, and the reduced product lifetime, and release it anyway because they care more about profits and the christmas kiddies' (read: future microsoft consumers) deadline.
Agreed. But I wouldn't be surprised to hear an announcement on this soon-ish. I actually got further than this myself with hard AI, coming up with a theory that seemed to produce many human "quirks" as unintentional byproducts of the design. As I understand it, a theory is basically proven when it's shown to match observable phenomena, so I take that as a pretty good sign that I was on the right track.
Now, the things that stopped me where not having enough higher-math knowledge to actually implement it all, not having powerful enough machines to develop it on, and not having the financial resources to concentrate on one project for a few years, that wouldn't pay my bills in the mean-time. But, lots of AI people and big organisations don't have that issue, so I think real progress is definitely possible soon.
Sure, if you've no morality whatsoever. People who develop revoluntionary ideas like this are as likely to have altruistic goals as militaristic ones, though, if not more likely.
Sometimes I think these things get raised once in a while just to keep the Open Source term popular.
Open Source is much less strong, conceptually speaking and in terms of future-proofing, against proprietary software than Free Software is. Free Software is about principles, which will never change, while Open Source is just about economics which can be changed with a price drop in proprietary software.
As it stands, about 2 thirds or 3 quarters of open software is GPL'd Free Software, not Open Source. We really should refer to it as Free Software, if we're too lazy to use terms like FOSS.
So, articles like this are harmful to us. Please be more careful, and at least use the term FOSS. (FLOSS isn't so good, because it isn't a unique word for search engines, if people want to find out what we're talking about).
Agreed. Well said.
As an aside, though, I should point out that "dll hell" isn't a factor if you use a decent distro with a package manager that can handle dependencies. There's nothing at all wrong with an app using lots of libraries; that's mainly where the integration and code-reuse and comes from. Doesn't hurt for reliable modules of well-tested code, either. GNOME got that part right, it's just what's *in* the libraries that's so screwed up:)
You know, I think people misunderstand the unix philosophy sometimes. It's not that apps do one thing. It's that they're modular, and *interoperate*.
A compiler doesn't do one thing: it does lots of stuff: parsing, translating, optimising, retargetting. But it does that by using other subtools, and by communicating with other parts of the system and libraries etc.
Likewise, there's no reason an app or tool can't play music and videos and download podcasts all in one slick interface. It's just that it shouldn't try to do all that with one huge mess of code, without relying on pre-existing work such as OGG codecs or ID3 tags, or RSS, or GTK/Qt/whatever.
KDE, for instance, is made up of many, many programs, all doing their own specialist things. They share libraries, and classes, and call child programs and expose application functions for scripting via DCOP and DBUS. They use existing technologies and build on them. It's not a single tool by any means; it's a framework of parts. And I think it's the very best example of Unix I've seen in quite a while.
Well, with all due respect, saying it's not likely to happen is meaningless. We're debating ways that it might happen, which is a much more detailed discussion. "It's not likely" is pretty vague.
Well, perhaps. But it's well-defined enough that graphics apps like Inkscape use it as their primary file format, and that different Linux apps and desktops can import them without major incompatibilities, and that people happily use SVG icons and wallpaper everyday. It's all relative, of course.
Yes, but I don't think that anyone in their right mind would interpret that as meaning that, when a user specifies an image to be put on top of another on a page layout, they want the transparancy of the image they specifically created with graduation to be ignored and replaced with a gray background or even 1-bit transparency. That's probably intended for applications where there IS nothing to be displayed behind the image. Anyway, I did say that, where there is ambiguity, that should be worked out in a community process, rather than guessed at.
Well, that's kind of my point: if the phone: url had been supported, it would have been as well-used as the mailto: url, and you wouldn't be asking this.
Certainly, SVG takes time, but there have been decent SVG engines available for a long time, including open source ones, and if a certification body existed to provide a reference implementation, that would have helped a lot.
Of course people will cherry pick features, but you can still have a core definition of what makes up a modern browser, and push that definition forward as you want the web to progress, if you can create a certification that people respect.
Yes, I know about the pitiful efforts of MS's PNG implementation. But, if they can rip out the rendering engine of their entire **operating system** and replace it with vector graphics, then they can surely add support for multi-bit transparency, if they actually care. They problem is, and my point is, that they didn't care, because standards compliance isn't currently a bit issue for them. That needs to change.
Well, I personally have seen a LOT of people switching from IE to Firefox, so I doubt those statistics. Of course, everyone has their own opinion on these things.
You know, ANSI C had holes in its standard too, but most of the weird, compiler-dependent stuff was covered by a #pragma directive, especially for that purpose. The rest of the compiler-specific stuff was generally an extension to the standard, rather than an interpretation of it.
(X)HTML has plenty of space for browser-specific extensions, without breaking the standard. And that's generally where extensions go, too.
The funny thing is: companies like MS still don't bother to implement things properly. Take PNG. In IE, PNG transparency took forever (I'm only vaguely recalling that it might have been fixed recently). But it's been in the PNG standard from day 1 -- an open standard, with no reason not to implement it, except laziness and lack of due import.
SVG is similar: a well-defined standard, with LOTS of potential for the web, but yet Microsoft ignore it. Hell, Mozilla has ignored it, too. It's available for Mozilla as an add-on, but why isn't it IN there now? What about Konqueror and Safari?
Where is support for the phone:// protocol? That's been around for years, too.
EVERY effort should be made to implement things, according to best practices for that particular standard.
Maybe what we need is not a better w3c standard, or a better PNG standard, or more marketing of SVG. Maybe what we need is more like a business practices standard, so that all browsers are certified as making continuous, ongoing efforts to keep up with new features, completely and accurately implement standards, and to resolve ambiguities in a community process before proceeding.
THEN, we need to market. But NOT a browser; we need to market that certification. That certification mark, say, "FUTURE Browser", or something, should be what people look for in a browser, not feature X, or feature Y. As much as the marketing and word-of-mouth process should extoll the virtues of FUTURE browsers, they should also shame any browser that doesn't comply, and old, and worthless.
That shame DOES work. It worked to take market share from IE, and give it to Firefox. It can work much more, when different browser organisations, and users of many platforms, all speak with one voice, and say that a browser is not a browser, if it doesn't have a FUTURE browser certification.
Never met a catholic, a post-Reagan republican, a neo-nazi or an existential realist?
No. People who mix incompatible philosophies and claim to be all of them are actually eclectic without realising it. You can take different things from different philosophies, and identify with all of them, but when a project is the direct offspring of a particular philosophy, it makes no sense to describe that as part of a different philosophy that came later.
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I never mentioned Quake OR outlawing anything. If programs are not accessible to disabled users, they should be fixed.
It's not a requirement for developers. It's a requirement for SOCIETY.
Well, I've also used both frequently, and actually heavily favored GNOME for years. You're entitled to your opinion of course, but I stand by my own.
Well, this seems designed to give nVidia lower production costs, yes.
However, it seems to me that graphics cards are WAY more expensive than they used to be. Normally, when new technologies become mainstream, they are introduced at a similar price to the old tech. and competition's tech., in an effort to compete. This is by design in capitalism, of course -- companies are supposed to compete to bring technology to the people at an ever cheaper price.
nVidia seemed to sidestep all of that good social design, though. Instead of bringing their new tech out at the normal price, they brought it out -- perhaps a LITTLE before its time, but not much -- at a higher price. And people bought it anyway. So now, people pay hundreds for cards that are really useless outside of high-end 3D workstations, since the software doesn't catch up that quickly.
Translation: nVidia and ATI are getting close-to-mainstream levels of sales at above-mainstream prices. As a result, they have ever more money to put into their products, and stomping out competition.
Let's hope we see those Free/Open graphics cards soon, before it's too late and nVidia is the hardware equivalent of Microsoft.
Exactly. On the face of it, KDE and GNOME can appear to be similar to some people. You may even dislike KDE's Qt interface for a while until you get used to it. However, KDE has amazingly powerful technology underneath. Spend a few months doing all your work on KDE, giving yourself time to discover (discovery learning is good) its hidden strengths, and you'll never look back.
I don't often agree with Linus, but what he said about GNOME and KDE was spot-on: when you take the time to try them both, you'll surely see that GNOME is clearly inferior, and KDE clearly shines as a bright technology -- perhaps the best technology -- available in Free Software.
Well, PAL is a standard in some countries, whereas NTSC is a standard in others. They're competing standards, but not in the SAME place.
At BEST, allowing people to choose between ODF and MSXML will lead to division and confusion and incompatibility within Mass. ITD, which is exactly what Quinn wanted a standard to solve. So, it defeats the purpose in the best case scenario. In the worst case scenario, however, you have an inferior format and all the vendor-lockin that goes with it chosen over the CLEARLY superior ODF format.
Also, you have MS manipulating governments to make it happen, when the (original) powers that were clearly favored the superior format and understood WHY they favored it.
There is absolutely nothing good about this, except for Microsoft. I don't know if this is a final decision, but if it is, then corporations have won over the citizens they're supposed to exist for yet again.
Although it's fascinating that mice could be created with human brain cells, this is actually the second such experiment. Whatever the reason... something to do with DNA that I don't quite understand... it turned out to be easier to modify chimp genes than mice genes to this. The research team put up a site, here.
Well, except that the military is probably quite interested in IPv6, since it'll give them lots of shiny new IP addresses for their shiny new cyberwarfare robots and guided missiles and soldiers with HUDs, etc.
No, you don't need users to give up peripherals to lock down ports. All you need to do is provide the peripherals in a managed way, on YOUR terms. Put printers directly on the network, not at people's desks. Force people to stop using floppy disks and other removable storage, and to rely on the centrally managed and backed-up fileserver(s). Force people to synchronise their laptop/tablet/pocketpc/palmtop over the network with pre-approved scripts/software/settings, rather than linking to their PC and copying files. Have one non-desktop system that allows a camera to be plugged in, and will automatically extract the pictures from it, then place them on the fileserver, in a secure folder for that department/user's own stuff, if need be.
Products have kinks, sure. But releasing a games console that overheats is just negligence and disrespect for customers. They could easily have left one running a benchmark and figured out how hot it gets. In fact, I can't think of ANY way to believe they didn't know about this and the crashing, and the reduced product lifetime, and release it anyway because they care more about profits and the christmas kiddies' (read: future microsoft consumers) deadline.
Agreed. But I wouldn't be surprised to hear an announcement on this soon-ish. I actually got further than this myself with hard AI, coming up with a theory that seemed to produce many human "quirks" as unintentional byproducts of the design. As I understand it, a theory is basically proven when it's shown to match observable phenomena, so I take that as a pretty good sign that I was on the right track.
Now, the things that stopped me where not having enough higher-math knowledge to actually implement it all, not having powerful enough machines to develop it on, and not having the financial resources to concentrate on one project for a few years, that wouldn't pay my bills in the mean-time. But, lots of AI people and big organisations don't have that issue, so I think real progress is definitely possible soon.
Sure, if you've no morality whatsoever. People who develop revoluntionary ideas like this are as likely to have altruistic goals as militaristic ones, though, if not more likely.
Sometimes I think these things get raised once in a while just to keep the Open Source term popular. Open Source is much less strong, conceptually speaking and in terms of future-proofing, against proprietary software than Free Software is. Free Software is about principles, which will never change, while Open Source is just about economics which can be changed with a price drop in proprietary software. As it stands, about 2 thirds or 3 quarters of open software is GPL'd Free Software, not Open Source. We really should refer to it as Free Software, if we're too lazy to use terms like FOSS. So, articles like this are harmful to us. Please be more careful, and at least use the term FOSS. (FLOSS isn't so good, because it isn't a unique word for search engines, if people want to find out what we're talking about).
Agreed. Well said. As an aside, though, I should point out that "dll hell" isn't a factor if you use a decent distro with a package manager that can handle dependencies. There's nothing at all wrong with an app using lots of libraries; that's mainly where the integration and code-reuse and comes from. Doesn't hurt for reliable modules of well-tested code, either. GNOME got that part right, it's just what's *in* the libraries that's so screwed up :)
Kopete integrates with KDE's mail etc. in the same way. Also, it has an iChat theme, if that's your thing.
You know, I think people misunderstand the unix philosophy sometimes. It's not that apps do one thing. It's that they're modular, and *interoperate*.
A compiler doesn't do one thing: it does lots of stuff: parsing, translating, optimising, retargetting. But it does that by using other subtools, and by communicating with other parts of the system and libraries etc.
Likewise, there's no reason an app or tool can't play music and videos and download podcasts all in one slick interface. It's just that it shouldn't try to do all that with one huge mess of code, without relying on pre-existing work such as OGG codecs or ID3 tags, or RSS, or GTK/Qt/whatever.
KDE, for instance, is made up of many, many programs, all doing their own specialist things. They share libraries, and classes, and call child programs and expose application functions for scripting via DCOP and DBUS. They use existing technologies and build on them. It's not a single tool by any means; it's a framework of parts. And I think it's the very best example of Unix I've seen in quite a while.
Well, with all due respect, saying it's not likely to happen is meaningless. We're debating ways that it might happen, which is a much more detailed discussion. "It's not likely" is pretty vague.
Well, perhaps. But it's well-defined enough that graphics apps like Inkscape use it as their primary file format, and that different Linux apps and desktops can import them without major incompatibilities, and that people happily use SVG icons and wallpaper everyday. It's all relative, of course.
Yes, but I don't think that anyone in their right mind would interpret that as meaning that, when a user specifies an image to be put on top of another on a page layout, they want the transparancy of the image they specifically created with graduation to be ignored and replaced with a gray background or even 1-bit transparency. That's probably intended for applications where there IS nothing to be displayed behind the image. Anyway, I did say that, where there is ambiguity, that should be worked out in a community process, rather than guessed at.
Well, that's kind of my point: if the phone: url had been supported, it would have been as well-used as the mailto: url, and you wouldn't be asking this. Certainly, SVG takes time, but there have been decent SVG engines available for a long time, including open source ones, and if a certification body existed to provide a reference implementation, that would have helped a lot. Of course people will cherry pick features, but you can still have a core definition of what makes up a modern browser, and push that definition forward as you want the web to progress, if you can create a certification that people respect. Yes, I know about the pitiful efforts of MS's PNG implementation. But, if they can rip out the rendering engine of their entire **operating system** and replace it with vector graphics, then they can surely add support for multi-bit transparency, if they actually care. They problem is, and my point is, that they didn't care, because standards compliance isn't currently a bit issue for them. That needs to change.
Ahh, that's good to hear at least. Thanks :)
Well, I personally have seen a LOT of people switching from IE to Firefox, so I doubt those statistics. Of course, everyone has their own opinion on these things.
You know, ANSI C had holes in its standard too, but most of the weird, compiler-dependent stuff was covered by a #pragma directive, especially for that purpose. The rest of the compiler-specific stuff was generally an extension to the standard, rather than an interpretation of it.
(X)HTML has plenty of space for browser-specific extensions, without breaking the standard. And that's generally where extensions go, too.
The funny thing is: companies like MS still don't bother to implement things properly. Take PNG. In IE, PNG transparency took forever (I'm only vaguely recalling that it might have been fixed recently). But it's been in the PNG standard from day 1 -- an open standard, with no reason not to implement it, except laziness and lack of due import.
SVG is similar: a well-defined standard, with LOTS of potential for the web, but yet Microsoft ignore it. Hell, Mozilla has ignored it, too. It's available for Mozilla as an add-on, but why isn't it IN there now? What about Konqueror and Safari?
Where is support for the phone:// protocol? That's been around for years, too.
EVERY effort should be made to implement things, according to best practices for that particular standard.
Maybe what we need is not a better w3c standard, or a better PNG standard, or more marketing of SVG. Maybe what we need is more like a business practices standard, so that all browsers are certified as making continuous, ongoing efforts to keep up with new features, completely and accurately implement standards, and to resolve ambiguities in a community process before proceeding.
THEN, we need to market. But NOT a browser; we need to market that certification. That certification mark, say, "FUTURE Browser", or something, should be what people look for in a browser, not feature X, or feature Y. As much as the marketing and word-of-mouth process should extoll the virtues of FUTURE browsers, they should also shame any browser that doesn't comply, and old, and worthless.
That shame DOES work. It worked to take market share from IE, and give it to Firefox. It can work much more, when different browser organisations, and users of many platforms, all speak with one voice, and say that a browser is not a browser, if it doesn't have a FUTURE browser certification.